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When love is not enough

The government wants to speed up adoption. It says too many children are languishing needlessly in care. But that is the best place for many of them, says Meg Henderson, who bitterly regrets adopting her daughter, Louise

In the past 24 years my husband and I have adopted three children and fostered many others. We are part of a mostly silent majority of adopters who have gradually become more vocal in an attempt to stem the number of adoptions taking place. Yes, that's right: we want fewer children to be adopted. We want the bandwagon halted in its tracks until social services get their act together and stop destroying well-meaning families.

Mass adoption in this country took off from a US initiative in the late 50s that rolled over here within a decade. You may remember the accompanying slogan: "Every child has a right to a family." No in-depth research, no thought, just an evangelical crusade that brooked no doubts. Indeed, anyone advising caution was likely to be stoned to death as a heretic; I bear the scars to this day. But Armageddon has come to pass, and the care system in the US is today in crisis, with the UK's crisis perhaps five years behind.

The whole foundation of child adoption, as opposed to baby adoption, was that tender loving care by ordinary, warm-hearted individuals would produce happy, healthy children. Appeals were made to the emotions on television and in the newspapers, with little comments such as "may be attention-seeking" or "needs a lot of reassurance" - phrases that old hands would recognise as covering a multitude of difficulties, but which meant little or nothing to the unsuspecting viewers at whom they were aimed. On television these appeals, together with footage showing appealing, needy children that touched the heart and the conscience, as they were designed to do, were fronted by celebrities who are still on my personal hit list; to this day I can't look at a Jane Asher cake without wanting to throw it at her. Social services, we were told, weren't looking for some impossible ideal, but for the average family, for people with a lot of love to give, and we all like to think we have that.

The trouble was, and still is, that it is all a lie, because the majority of children in care are so damaged that ordinary, warm-hearted individuals have no hope of coping with them.

However much it goes against the zeal, not every child is adoptable. The breakdown rate in adoption began to soar, though to this day most social services will come over all coy and vague when asked to put a figure on it, and they never tell prospective adopters that breakdowns happen. But, for the record, a major study some years ago in Strathclyde region found that breakdowns escalated from around 16% if the child was adopted aged five, to 60% if the child was adopted at nine or older. There is no reason to suspect that other areas of Britain do any better.

In that study, three years was counted as a success but, as battle-scarred old sorts like me know, adoptions can break down after longer than that. There are lots of reasons, lots of problems, from constant lying, stealing and other forms of anti-social behaviour, to the most common: the inability of the child to form emotional attachment. Children in distress either sink or swim, and the swimmers often do so by looking out for number one. Families give affection and it is taken, often with demands for even more, but it can be debilitating and draining when little comes back, and even when it does, there may be strings attached. The children become users of others, portraying an affection they don't feel to get whatever they want. It's a common scenario and even understanding it doesn't necessarily make it any easier to cope with year after year.

My family's experiences are not unique; we have not been especially unlucky. There are a lot of us out there. Anyone who is told "it's just like having your own" should sue. Our son, Euan, was a baby adoption. We then fostered two girls, Louise and Marion, aged 30 months and 18 months respectively, adopting them five years later. Louise, was, according to the case social worker, "showing early signs of disturbance... she clings to people". How we laugh when we think back, however wryly. Believing that we were reclaiming a child with the potential to become a functioning human being, we sank most of our energies into Louise over the years, taking time and emotion from ourselves and our other two children. But gradually, as we unwound Louise's problems, we discovered more than we had been told. An officer from the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children told us that Louise had been battered at 10 months by one of mummy's boyfriends because she wouldn't call him daddy, and after that she was noticed head-banging. Recognising this as a sign of brain damage, a health visitor informed social services who made an appointment for the mother to take Louise to hospital for a check-up. When she failed to turn up for three appointments they shrugged their caring shoulders and did nothing more. Neither did they tell us, her now adoptive parents, only confirming it when we found out. And that became the pattern; as we discovered some new horror they would confirm it, but nothing more was disclosed.

Life with Louise became more hellish as she grew and we kept in touch with social services, so they knew that our family life was under great stress. We were no longer looking for progress, we were trying to contain her increasingly bizarre behaviour. Our son, Euan, walked out of the house one day and didn't come back for the longest 36 hours of our lives, worn down and depressed by the strain of life with Louise. He was doing his Highers [the Scottish equivalent of A-levels] at the time. He failed them and left school. It took him three years to enrol at college to resit Highers and A levels, which meant that he started university later than he should have.

In the meantime, Louise had been diagnosed as psychotic at 16, and we realised that what we had been living with was the characteristic long, slow decline of schizophrenia-type illnesses. When I told the placing social worker he replied: "Well, that's hardly surprising, given her family history." He then unfolded the rest of her family history, which was riddled with mental illness. He hadn't disclosed it before, he said, "because no psychiatrist would give us official diagnoses on the other family members, due to patient confidentiality". Didn't it occur to him to tell us that there were grounds to ask for these diagnoses? And when did he find out, "officially"?

We have now found out the full extent of Louise's problems: brain damage consistent with violent shaking of a child under the age of one, a form of moderate to severe autism that can follow such injuries, and, of course, a psychosis that is only partially controlled by powerful drugs with their attendant side-effects. In the circumstances, confirmation of early sexual abuse somehow paled into insignificance. The prognosis is that she will never work, marry, have children or even be allowed out without an escort, and for the rest of her life she will need 24-hour care.

It was our belief that social services owed our other two children compensation for their ruined childhoods, and that they should make some kind of settlement to ensure Louise's future care; compensating my husband and me would be impossible. Their response has been to say that they think they're legally covered, that we should have sued within three years of finding out what they knew, three years when we were desperately trying to cope with a mentally ill child. And besides, they say, total disclosure wasn't policy when we adopted the girls in 1985 - not true, but it wastes more time on pointless correspondence. I know of adoptive parents in similar circumstances who have wasted four-figure sums involving lawyers in just this kind of stalling, the local authority happy in the knowledge that as a result they will have that much less to finance a court case. Legally covered, you see; morality doesn't come into it.

It doesn't stop there. Some years ago, as special foster parents, we took two boys, George, nine and Sandy, 12, both with varying degrees of foetal alcohol syndrome, which affected them both mentally and physically. It was our job to find out if they were adoptable and, if they were, to get them into an adoptable state. We quickly discovered that social services' greatest worry, that George had "problems of gender identification", was wide of the mark; he was anatomically male, but in his mind he was female. His femininity gave him access to the company of girls, but it soon became clear that he had much deeper psychological problems when we witnessed a variety of unprovoked attacks on girls, verbal, physical and sexual.

It was when he attacked Marion that we discovered what everyone else already knew: that this tendency was well-documented. They had placed an abusing boy in a family with two girls. Given George's problems and with puberty looming, we gave our opinion that he was not adoptable and that more attention should be focused on Sandy, who might be. We were so concerned that Sandy was being sacrificed to support his brother that we offered to adopt him. And that's when social services descended, removing both boys. You can't adopt if you don't have custody of the child. One social worker justified removing both boys with the remark: "After all, blood's thicker than water." Despite protestations that the boys would be placed with a family within months, both remained in care till their late teens, and Sandy never did find out that he could have been adopted. In fact, he died not knowing. It was just a small paragraph in a newspaper - murders are not uncommon in big cities these days. Sandy, aged 21, was attacked and stabbed with a sword. When he was released from care where could he go but back to the deprived, rundown, violent inner-city area he came from? There was nowhere else. Blood is indeed thicker than water, as those who had to hose Sandy's blood off the street doubtless noticed.

As old hands at adoption know, what matters most is not how young the children are, but what has happened to them in their lives, and the family history. You only have to think of how much a child learns in its first year to have some idea of the harm that can be done in that time. Social workers often say that the level of damage is not apparent for years, which is true, and so they go on placing ticking time bombs within unsuspecting families. Being childless and wanting a family or feeling sorry for these children are bad reasons for adopting. The only people who should take them on are those with an almost professional ability and knowledge; kindly, golden-hearted, warm, loving, ordinary people risk destroying themselves and their families.

Some placements do work out well, we know about those because they are always the ones trotted out as "examples". But there is no way of knowing if you are being told the full truth, or of predicting which placements will succeed, and finding out has destroyed many marriages and families. In recent years, as adopters have become more vocal about the fall-out of that misguided bandwagon from the US, and a new generation of social workers has replaced the mindless crusaders, adoption has slowed down. Not a bad thing, when you remember the extra damage done to children whose adoptions have failed, as well as the families they have scarred.

The sad fact, one that has been scorned out of ignorance and dogma, is that there are many children who are so damaged that they can only handle institutional care. But that doesn't mean the workhouse or years of abuse - it means that we have to look at providing different kinds of institutional care to suit the children who cannot cope with life within a family and cannot be coped with. The last thing we need now is another New Labour crusade of show without substance, a simplistic vote-enhancer for Tony, saviour of little children. Generations of children have suffered enough damage, as have families conned by nonsense about "tender loving care". Soundbite solutions are not the answer.

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About this article

When love is not enough

This article appeared on p2 of the G2 section of the Guardian
on Tuesday 22 February 2000.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 21.30 EST on Tuesday 22 February 2000.
It was last modified at 05.53 EDT on Thursday 1 November 2012.